ST. LOUIS — If you’re just judging the St. Louis Blues game on Saturday based off the result, you’re thinking Ottawa Senators game all over again.
Well, the score line is exactly the same, this time an 8-1 drubbing at the hands of the Washington Capitals, a game in which Alex Ovechkin scored twice to get closer to Wayne Gretzky’s all-time goals record with his 862nd and 863rd goals (31 away from tying it), but it didn’t exactly come off like the game in Canada’s capital did 11 days ago.
For 40 minutes, I didn’t think the Blues played all that poorly. Yes, they allowed another first goal inside the first minute for the second straight game and the seventh straight time they’ve allowed the first goal, but as the game progressed, they had some really good scoring chances.
Alexey Toropchenko, Brandon Saad, Brayden Schenn, Zack Bolduc to name a few, had some real high quality, high danger scoring chances in the game.
They came out of the first tied 1-1, thanks to Scott Perunovich’s first NHL goal, and even in falling behind 3-1, their second period may have been even better from a scoring-chance perspective.
They made a few critical errors (Schenn allowing Dylan Strome to beat him without putting a body on him leading to Ovechkin’s 2-1 goal, and Jordan Kyrou getting his pocket picked yet again in the neutral zone that ultimately led to Jakob Chychrun’s 3-1 goal).
So one would think the home side can still come out with some pushback and get into the game. With the amount of quality scoring chances they had for 40 minutes, maybe they could crack Logan Thompson, who was brilliant with some of his saves.
Well, it wasn’t even close to what the Blues needed. Not by a longshot.
It was downright pitiful.
Five goals by the Capitals, who were playing like they were the one’s chasing the game and pushing the envelope.
Jordan Binnington was made the sacrificial lamb of poor and shoddy play. The result was a beating on home ice and getting booed off the ice. But the boos sounded more like the 18,096 were more stunned at what was happening in the moment as opposed to the entire night.
It fell off the rails quick, and it fell off hard.
“To be honest, I don’t really have an answer for that. It’s completely unacceptable,” Blues defenseman Justin Faulk said. “It’s just not right. I don’t think that should ever happen, a situation like that. We need to have respect for each other, the game. You can’t just go out there and play summer hockey for a period and think that’s alright at any point. We’re grown men in this league and need to put in an effort that’s acceptable. It’s not going to go your way every night but you can’t let… that’s just unacceptable.”
Almost as if the team gave up?
“Yeah, it can look like a lot of things,” Faulk said. “There wasn’t much passion, much energy. There at times it looked like literally nothing. I don’t have words that’s acceptable.”
Schenn agreed.
“It boils down to effort,” he said. “We let our goalie hang out to dry there in the third period and let them get eight (goals). You can’t sugar-coat it when you let in eight. It just boils down to being in a hockey game, being able to come back 3-1, to letting in five in the third period. It’s just absolutely unacceptable.”
So for a team that is void of superstar talent and dealing with a plethora of injuries, how does effort come into play yet again? Wasn’t the Ottawa debacle enough of a reminder? It should be since it happened so recently (Oct. 29).
But yet here we are again, talking about whether guys are putting in the effort or not.
“It’s easy to sit here and be negative about the situation,” Blues coach Drew Bannister said. “There’s many reasons to look back … in the last two weeks, we’ve had two games where it’s just unacceptable, the way we’re playing in those situations and finding ways to stop the bleeding. We bounce back with some good efforts, but we haven’t been able to sustain it. We have to be able to sustain better hockey. We can’t take one or two steps forward and then keep taking these steps back. Our consistency when we’re playing well, we have to be able to maintain that.”
At 7-8-0, it’s evident that isn’t happening. And even with Robert Thomas (fractured right ankle), Philip Broberg (right knee) and others that have been out of the lineup, there have been games where they’ve been able to plod through the tough times.
But whatever that was in the third period tonight looked like a school kid looking for pity.
“I don’t know. No one else feels sorry for us. I hope not,” Faulk said.
“We liked a period and a half there. We didn’t like the last couple we gave up to make it 3-1. I know we weren’t too happy about that, but it’s a two-goal game, you going to the third at home, you have an opportunity to put some pressure on and see — they’re on a back-to-back — if you can kind of wear them out a little bit and take over for a period and get yourself back into it, but the opportunity was there to at least make a game of it and we did the exact opposite.”
Let’s just look at Washington’s fourth goal, Ovechkin’s power-play goal that made it 4-1 at 2:09.
Watch how the Blues just allow the middle of the ice, then get scrambly in the zone. Allowing the Caps to enter the zone, then no coverage whatsoever if effort-based:
The fifth goal was no different:
And the sixth goal looks like a carbon copy of the fourth:
And the seventh, another easy entry and no awareness whatsoever of who is supposed to be doing what:
“Guys just need to realize, we as a group need to realize it’s the National Hockey League, there’s nothing for free in this league,” Faulk said. “You can’t take any night for granted. Other guys want to come in here and would die to play in this league, there’s guys fighting for spots every night, there’s guys on our team that aren’t in the lineup. I guarantee you they’re sitting there thinking, ‘Why wasn’t I in the lineup tonight when this effort comes through?’ Guys are hungry and you can’t take anything for granted. Those two losses in a short period are an opportunity for us to look at ourselves and try and figure out what we want to accomplish, where we want to be ad how we want to grow as a group.”
The Blues say they understand that some of the top guys missing (Thomas and Broberg) aren’t coming back any time soon. This schedule isn’t going to get any easier. If they don’t figure this out quickly, this is going to get ugly real fast. And I don’t mean trying to run-and-gun their opponents.
The Blues better get back to winning ugly, because that’s their only shot.
“Yeah, we don’t focus on injuries and when guys are getting back,” Schenn said. “We have problems to fix right now in our room with stuff like that happening. I think we’ll be fine. We just have to come together and get guys really believe that when we play the right way, we are a good hockey team. And when we let stuff slide, that’s when our problems kind of mount on top of us. We have to play a hard game. We have to play a simple game, and when we do, it’s effective. But when we don’t, stuff like that happens.
“I think guys are buying in. It’s not a fact of who’s buying in and who’s not. It’s a hard game to play every single night. We’re not getting out to leads. We’re not scoring a ton of goals. Then we kind of have to keep on grinding and clawing our way back into hockey games. So it all starts with the belief on winning games, 2-1, 3-2, and that’s the reality of where we need to be right now. Like I said, we can fix this no problem. It’s obviously going to take everyone involved to come out with a good response on Tuesday against a good hockey team. Tonight, it’s just unacceptable letting that happen at home.”
And as far as figuring it out, it’s going to have to come from coaches AND players. But quite honestly, some players better start pulling their heads out of their you-know-what.
“We have to sort it out as a group,” Bannister said. “It’s not just going to be the players. It’s going to be the coaches and the players together. We’re in this together.”
